It’s NOT Too Late to Try Bush, Cheney and Obama for War Crimes

We Can Still Prosecute …

Many argue that the statute of limitations on Bush and Cheney’s crimes of lying us into the Iraq war and torture have all run … so it is too late to prosecute them.

However, the United States War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal statute set forth at 18 U.S.C. § 2441, makes it a federal crime for any U.S. national, whether military or civilian, to violate the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder, torture, or inhuman treatment.

18 U.S.C. § 2441 has no statute of limitations, which means that a war crimes complaint can be filed at any time.

The penalty may be life imprisonment or — if a single prisoner dies due to torture — death. Given that there are numerous, documented cases of prisoners being tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that means that the death penalty would be appropriate for anyone found guilty of carrying out, ordering, or sanctioning such conduct.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 limited the applicability of the War Crimes Act, but still made the following unlawful: torture, cruel or inhumane treatment, murder, mutilation or maiming, intentionally causing serious bodily harm, rape, sexual assault or abuse.

The American Civil Liberties Union today made public an analysis of new and previously released autopsy and death reports of detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom died while being interrogated. The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions.

“”There is no question that U.S. interrogations have resulted in deaths,”” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “”High-ranking officials who knew about the torture and sat on their hands and those who created and endorsed these policies must be held accountable.

***

The documents released today include 44 autopsies and death reports as well as a summary of autopsy reports of individuals apprehended in Iraq and Afghanistan. The documents show that detainees died during or after interrogations by Navy Seals, Military Intelligence and “”OGA”” (Other Governmental Agency) — a term, according to the ACLU, that is commonly used to refer to the CIA.

According to the documents, 21 of the 44 deaths were homicides. Eight of the homicides appear to have resulted from abusive techniques used on detainees, in some instances, by the CIA, Navy Seals and Military Intelligence personnel. The autopsy reports list deaths by “”strangulation,”” “”asphyxiation”” and “”blunt force injuries.”” An overwhelming majority of the so-called “”natural deaths”” were attributed to “”Arteriosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease.””

While newspapers have recently reported deaths of detainees in CIA custody, today’s documents show that the problem is pervasive, involving Navy Seals and Military Intelligence too.

At least two men died during imprisonment. One of them, a 22-year-old taxi driver named Dilawar, was suspended by his hands from the ceiling for four days, during which US military personnel repeatedly beat his legs. Dilawar died on Dec. 10, 2002. In the autopsy report, a military doctor wrote that the tissue on his legs had basically been “pulpified.” As it happens, his interrogators had already known — and later testified — that there was no evidence against Dilawar …

With last week’s release of the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, it is now widely known that Bush administration officials distorted Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape “SERE” training – a legitimate program used by the military to train our troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations – by authorizing abusive techniques from SERE for use in detainee interrogations. Those decisions conveyed the message that abusive treatment was appropriate for detainees in U.S. custody. They were also an affront to the values articulated by General Petraeus.

In SERE training, U.S. troops are briefly exposed, in a highly controlled setting, to abusive interrogation techniques used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions. The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. Until recently, the Navy SERE school also used waterboarding. The purpose of the SERE program is to provide U.S. troops who might be captured a taste of the treatment they might face so that they might have a better chance of surviving captivity and resisting abusive and coercive interrogations.

Senator Levin then documents that SERE techniques were deployed as part of an official policy on detainees, and that SERE instructors helped to implement the interrogation programs. He noted:

The senior Army SERE psychologist warned in 2002 against using SERE training techniques during interrogations in an email to personnel at Guantanamo Bay, because:

[T]he use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects… When individuals are gradually exposed to increasing levels of discomfort, it is more common for them to resist harder… If individuals are put under enough discomfort, i.e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. This will increase the amount of information they tell the interrogator, but it does not mean the information is accurate. In fact, it usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain… Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low. The likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the level of resistance in a detainee is very high… (p. 53).

Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration…

For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document…

When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.”Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

“I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”

Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.

Despite what you’ve seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.

So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a “ticking time bomb” scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.

***

Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: “Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe.

Indeed, one of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.

Jessen’s notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a “master” SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).

Kearns and his boss, Roger Aldrich, the head of the Air Force Intelligence’s Special Survial Training Program (SSTP), based out of Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington, hired Jessen in May 1989. Kearns, who was head of operations at SSTP and trained thousands of service members, said Jessen was brought into the program due to an increase in the number of new SERE courses being taught and “the fact that it required psychological expertise on hand in a full-time basis.”

Jessen, then the chief of Psychology Service at the US Air Force Survival School, immediately started to work directly with Kearns on “a new course for special mission units (SMUs), which had as its goal individual resistance to terrorist exploitation.”

The course, known as SV-91, was developed for the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) branch of the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, which acted as the Executive Agent Action Office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jessen’s notes formed the basis for one part of SV-91, “Psychological Aspects of Detention.”

***

Kearns was one of only two officers within DoD qualified to teach all three SERE-related courses within SSTP on a worldwide basis, according to a copy of a 1989 letter written Aldrich, who nominated him officer of the year.

***

The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered – not just ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar,” he said. “What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It is exploitation, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”

***

Jessen wrote that cooperation is the “end goal” of the detainer, who wants the detainee “to see that [the detainer] has ‘total’ control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.).”

***

Kearns said, based on what he has read in declassified government documents and news reports about the role SERE played in the Bush administration’s torture program, Jessen clearly “reverse-engineered” his lesson plan and used resistance methods to abuse “war on terror” detainees.

So we have the two main Air Force insiders concerning the genesis of the torture program confirming – with original notes – that the whole purpose of the torture program was to extract false confessions.

But Are They Guilty of War Crimes?

The Nuremberg Tribunal which convicted and sentenced Nazis leaders to death conceived of wars of aggression – i.e. wars not launched in self-defense – defined the following as “crimes against peace”, or war crimes:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i)

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Given that Iraq had no connection with 9/11 and possessed no weapons of mass destruction, the Iraq war was a crime of aggression and – under the standards by which Nazi leaders were convicted by the Nuremberg Tribunal – the American leaders who lied us into that war are guilty of war crimes.

Benjamin Ferencz, a former chief prosecutor for the Nuremberg Trials, declared:

A prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity — that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.

The Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court – Luis Moreno-Ocampo – told the Sunday Telegraph in 2007:

That he would be willing to launch an inquiry and could envisage a scenario in which the Prime Minister and American President George W Bush could one day face charges at The Hague. Luis Moreno-Ocampo urged Arab countries, particularly Iraq, to sign up to the court to enable allegations against the West to be pursued.

In January 2003, a group of American law professors warned President George W. Bush that he and senior officials of his government could be prosecuted for war crimes if their military tactics violated international humanitarian law.

Eminent legal scholars such as former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clarke and Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law and a professor of law Lawrence Velvel have since stated that high-level Bush administration officials did commit war crimes in relation to the Iraq war.

You have documented that Carl Herman is correct to be focusing on this matter as he is.

However, unfortunately, I do still doubt that there will be any prosecutions, unless a progressive Democrat becomes the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2016 and wins the Presidency, because there’s no other way we’ll get a progressive President, and no Republican is going to prosecute any of the elite mega-criminals: not the banksters, not Bush, not Obama — none of them.

Or, unless, the 40% of independents and another 10% – 15% of those who’ve come to recognize that on issues of economic justice and foreign affairs there is no light left between the two war addicted corporatist parties, and decide to throw their votes away on third parties…

Carl_Herman

Just to restate what I commented in your article, Eric:

Eric, we have zero control over who wins the presidency (especially given massive election fraud including unaccountable electronic voting machines and corporate media herding away from people like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul).

We have total control to state “emperor has no clothes” obvious facts like War Crimes that must be prosecuted if we dare call ourselves civilized, educated, American, etc.

Under the current criminal system, we’ll just get more of what we’ve already gotten, of course. The scenario of victory that I see most possible is either through the 2014 Worldwide Wave of Action (Occupy version 2.0) or future expressions (Occupy 3.0, etc.) that I express in some detail here:

1. Expose 1% oligarchs in the US and elsewhere as OBVIOUS criminals centering in war, money, and media (also in ~100 other crucial areas).

2. Cause their surrender through arrests or Truth & Reconciliation.

3. Initiate true freedom for all Earth’s inhabitants to explore ready breakthroughs in economics (links here) and technology, and discover what it is to be human without psychopathic criminals who joke about killing millions, harming billions, and looting trillions.

If point 1 happens, then we polarize who chooses to embrace the War Criminals and who stands for their arrests. At that point, we’ve won: the minions will abandon their “masters.”

Congress is powerless to absolve Bush of capital crimes and torture charges
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Bush is in a heap of trouble. The US Congress should be impeaching Bush
—NOT conspiring with him to cover his backside! Whatever torture
compromise may work its way through an intimidated Congress, it must not
help Bush. The US Constitution requires nothing less than a
Constitutional Amendment to relieve U.S. obligations under the Geneva
convention. At least one Constitutional provision means that nothing legal can get Bush off the hook for the crimes that he has already committed.

Bush seeks an ex post facto law that will make legal —after the fact —his violations of the Geneva Convention having to do with torture.

No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

—US Constitution, Article I

That means that Bush cannot commit crimes and make them “legal” later.
That includes his having ordered summary executions and brutal tortures,
only to have them made legal ex post facto, The Constitution flatly states that it doesn’t work that way!
snip

The world has every reason to doubt. There is no
moral basis for the US position and the actions taken on Bush’s watch.
Bush, like Hitler before him, has thumbed his nose at US international
obligations though we are bound to them by our own Constitution —the
supreme law of the land.

Bev

Pardon me. You have the same information:

However, the United States War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal statute set forth at 18 U.S.C. § 2441, makes it a federal crime for any U.S. national, whether military or civilian, to violate the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder,
torture, or inhuman treatment.

The statute applies not only to those who carry out the acts, but also to those who ORDER IT, know about it, or fail to take steps to stop it. The statute applies to everyone, no matter how high and mighty.

18 U.S.C. § 2441 has no statute of limitations, which means that a war crimes complaint can be filed at any time.
………………..

We know we have the evidence/proof to get a conviction. WHO is going to prosecute the case? Who is going to convene the grand jury?

Your preaching to the choir GW. We need to move to the next step.

We need to fund the prosecution and hire the prosecutor. ANYONE can prosecute a crime.

I don’t think we can force the prosecution in US court but we sure can in State court as Res Publica.

Nancy Johnson

Hilarious article, as if time had anything to do with it. Crimes
prosecuted are largely about social control. WWII was specifically ended
with a pompous politiccal ceremony to throw some of the defeated to the
wolves. Meanwhile, the US hired most of Nazi Germany’s talent. We
didn’t see anyone from Ford Motor tried at Nueremberg, what rational
individual hopes to see the architects of recent and on going
expeditions in genocide brought before a Kangaroo court? Remember how
this Kangaroo bounced in front of the terrorist financed destruction of
Libya? Remember, most US assaults – including those that are military –
are designed for maximum destruction of human life. Women, children and
civilians are always are the most important targets in coventional war,
an absolute crushing of any possibilty of resistance. Difficult for
24/7 overwhelmed Americans to understand. Yes, we deliberately kill
women and children in most engagements. Cleanly, with surgical precison,
extrajudicially, and with drones…
Yes, let’s go back and get
Powell for covering up My Lai, and finally bring Calley, and thousands
more like him that we’ve never even heard about to justice. Ridiculous.
Some of these neocons have been war “criminals” for decades. To the
streets with David Swanson, storm Northrup Grumman, we’ll get ’em to
justice! Yawwwwnn.

Carl_Herman

Fair enough, Nancy. And that said, what do you suggest we do about it?

If you don’t have a better idea than yawning at David Swanson, then perhaps you should create some way to support us who are taking action to awaken a critical mass to the history you show that you understand.

“On torture, the report found that the evidence of a torture program by the United States is clear and called for an investigation and prosecution of members of the “armed forces and other agents of the U.S. government.” While there should be no need to remind this country: “The State party [the United States] should ensure that all cases of unlawful killing, torture or other ill-treatment, unlawful detention, or enforced disappearance are effectively, independently and impartially investigated, that perpetrators, including, in particular, persons in command positions, are prosecuted and sanctioned, and that victims are provided with effective remedies.”

VD65

I think everyone knows that the military is sort of a maverick group. Just because there is a President doesn’t mean they ordered any of this and often the individual groups of soldiers up close and personal with the prisoners take it upon themselves to do things that are not allowed. The military in general always try to cover up illegal activities usually of a few, just like they cover up rapes.

She’s now getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to again deceive, proclaiming that she was well-intentioned in ordering the destructive, illegal wars and torture. Her speech title indicates a talk on how she promoted justice and civil rights. The Northrop auditorium’s seats to hear Ms. Rice were all spoken for in 12 hours and most likely, the Minnesotan audience will give standing ovations for the presidential (or vice presidential) bid speech she’ll quite likely be practicing.

ryan

These men are war criminals they should be tried for treason for sacrificing our own troops for their personal gain..

shark

With so many trillions going to security contractors thanks to the political war criminals, do you think any of them would lift their finger for their country? The bread is where their patriotism is.

Andrew Shecktor

We should start prosecuting all the criminal politicians – get them out of office if they currently hold a position. The political arena really needs to get its act together – they are supposed to represent us and be representative of us. It looks bad for all of America having so many criminal and corrupt political “leaders!”

I can prove obama will probably be found non responsive in his bathroom… just like Hitler… after all, it’s his grandfather… and that’s a provable fact
at the one stop shop for the truth. Removal of my comments facts is a
felony war crime and I can prove that too. Picture 22,580 http://jamessssmith.com/2015/04/04/john-woodman-an-epilogue/

I quote: The similarities between Hitler and Bush in points of
genealogy and actions should strike anyone with half a brain left as a
big red WARNING SIGN. http://www.exposingtruth.com/t…

I quote; “If the links tying the German origins of the Trump family
to Hitler’s genealogy were already well known, finding common ancestors
between Hitler and Barrack Obama as well was definitely a surprise,”
admits leading researcher Jean-Anthony D’Alsace.

“The family tree of Ann Dunham, Barrack Obama’s mother, is truly
fascinating. We have found common relatives not only with the Hitler
family, which both families are linked together closely by multiple
marriages within the last century, but also with Baron Lionel Nathan de
Rothschild, a high profile Jewish international banker.

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